It doesn't take nation-state resources to kill a random civilian. It's a few tens of thousands of dollars. Even a few million is basically nothing to a corporation like this.

It would be utter insanity to ask someone who legally works for you to kill someone. Which is why that doesn't happen. What actually happens is someone tells someone to deal with the guy and a paper bag full of cash appears in front of Joe's Killin Place in the middle of the night.

You seem to not understand that someone can disagree with you without it being some grand conspiracy or authoritarian cabal. It is infinitely more likely that people disagree because they think you're a moron. People think you're a moron because you act like one. Spouting off about conspiracies and cabals and you've somehow pulled Obama into it?

You aren't being dismissed because the big bad communists want to steal your bitcoins. You're being dismissed because you're pasting nine whole paragraphs of absolute insane ramblings.

Today I'm married to a different person and still administering email for my ex. Out of everything that came of that relationship, I regret the email server the most.

If there exists a way to transmit information from one human to another, it has been used for porn.

AI can replace porn stars in exactly the same way that drawn or animated porn does.

Let is redundant, that's what the = is for. Unless it's meant to be equivalent to 'var' or 'auto', in which case it's even worse.

Let contains no information, it's pointless clutter that replaced something that did contain vital information. Let tells you the next symbol is a variable. What type? Who knows and who cares, it's a variable, deal with it. C marks a symbol as a variable by using its type name.

I mean, this was a very large part of why Perl is so miserable. I will never understand why people choose to implement this in modern languages.

Anyway, variables and parameters without explicit, visible type information is a hard no for me. I took a sniff of a couple rust projects, saw this mess, and decided that rust is not for me. I don't care about all the other magical benefits that cure all my ails, this feature is a dealbreaker, full stop.

I would rather read someone else's Perl script than Rust.

It's very much one of these new-age languages that feel the need to reinvent every wheel and invent entirely new syntactical idioms just so they can be different.

And yeah, the "just use rust, pleb" attitude is also super offputting. I'm not interested in dealing with people like that when I'm learning a language. I have plenty of much, much less terrible options.

I can just get any quality of any movie or show. It might take hours or days for obscure stuff to pop up, but mainstream media is usually downloaded in ten minutes. Then it lives in my jellyfin server where my husband and I can watch at any time anywhere.

It's been really nice. I was dismayed at first that there's no function to browse, only search for specific titles. But after a few weeks I think this is the right decision. I have to specifically seek out what I want, which has greatly reduced the amount of utter trash being consumed.

It's really nice. It's an actually pleasant experience when it works well. Netflix is more consistent than my multilayered stack of server containers, but Netflix is pure agony to use no matter how stable it is.

Piracy is now an order of magnitude easier than paying for something. Even if you do pay for something anymore, it's usually a license that can be revoked at any time with no notice or refund. Why would I even waste my time with that?

It's also terrible. "Fr" will find FreeCAD, the program I want. "Fre" pulls up "advanced system settings" because there's some subsection about free disk space. "Free" brings back FreeCAD.

Every single thing I do that involves any level of interaction with Windows has found some way of pissing me off.

Paraphrased, but this actually happened on my work machine a few months ago. This kind of bullshit and bald faced disrespect is why I haven't used windows at home in years.

Since one of the biggest advantages of our species is our brains, it makes sense that evolution would produce slightly different types that give different advantages. Given that we're a social species, having a variety of neurotypes in a group would offer all the advantages while the group as a whole offsets the disadvantages like inattention.

Imagine a group of hunters. Someone with ADHD might hyperfocus and be really good at spotting fast prey like rabbits or birds, but may not notice a wolf creeping up on them. The group can compensate for that, and are more successful than without the ADHD tracker.

Just think about the wide variety in our bodies. There's a whole spectrum of physical ability from very small and nimble humans to very big and very strong ones. There's a huge range of different adaptations evolved by different groups. It really just makes sense that we'd see a similar sort of variety in structure and ability of something as complex as a brain.

Humans evolved to fill niches, same as any animal.

Faster discovery doesn't change the resolution. Random citizens cannot do anything even if they could see it. An employee can already post publicly, shout to the rooftops. Plenty do.

Technology can't fix this problem because it is fundamentally not technological in nature. We do not lack the technology to process payments at scale. We've been operating a global economy for a few years now. That is indeed a technological problem, but not the one we're talking about.

Wage theft is fundamentally a breach of contract. Your employer has entered a contract wherein they are legally required to pay you some explicit amount within some explicit timeframe. The problem is not that the transaction can't be processed or audited. The problem is that a person chose to never initiate the transaction, or they paid less than they agreed on. This is a legal problem which requires legal action to correct.

No matter how the evidence is collected, you still have to go through the legal process. The resolution is still retroactive and the employee is made whole for all missing wages present and past. You still have to pull bank records and have an auditor look at them. It really does not matter in the slightest if it takes milliseconds or days to pull the records. The legal process takes weeks or months and the employee is made whole for the same amount either way.

I'm not saying you're wrong because I don't like cryptocurrency, I'm saying you're wrong because you're proposing a technological solution to a problem that fundamentally cannot be fixed with technology. Your solution simply does not address the problem at hand.

The only actually relevant point you've made so far is that a public ledger would make audits easier. And sure, why not. Totally valid point. Also totally irrelevant. The outcome is precisely the same no matter what. The employee gets the same settlement either way. The legal process is still the same. The incentives for governments to investigate are still the same. The social and political issues driving lack of enforcement still exist. A public ledger just doesn't change any of that.

Cryptocurrency might solve some problems, I don't really know or care. But it definitely won't solve this problem. No technology will.

Your original claim was that auditing of bank accounts would solve the problem. Since you've admitted that we already have auditing mechanisms in place, what does cryptocurrency add?

Maybe take a second to consider why the problem exists, what the current mitigations are, and why those mitigations don't work. Then reflect on what your solution does differently than everything else we've tried over the last hundred or so years.

> Neither is eating but better technology has certainly reduced famine.

Agriculture is a technology. Growing food at industrial scales is a technological problem. Without cheap synthesis of fertilizer, absolutely no amount of manpower, social movements, or laws can produce food at these scales. It is purely a technological issue. Distributing that food to the world is a social problem that technology has not solved in the last century.

> If on a forum self labeled as "Hacker News" you don't understand that you can use technology to assist with solving problems I haven't much hope for you.

People usually resort to condescension when they know they don't have an intelligent argument to make but still want to feel superior. How's that going for you?

The IRS could monitor outflows of the site's bank account and make sure that the employees are being paid regularly.

Wouldn't be an issue with enforcement of the law.

Employees could monitor their own bank account to ensure they're getting paid properly. If not, they can report it to the labor board who will enforce the already existing laws.

This is not a technological problem. Quit trying to make things even worse by shoving cryptographic woo woo into social and legal problems and insisting it will somehow magically solve everything. This is a social, legal, and political problem. Technology will not solve it. Technology hasn't solved it in the last century, it's not going to solve it now that the math is fancy.

Unquestionably.

What I do with your software is quite frankly none of your business. You do not have the right to know what I do with my hardware. Your metrics are not my concern.

FOSS is a very personal thing. Try framing it as a conversation between you and your users:

"Hey, we work hard on this and would really appreciate it if you share telemetry so we can focus our efforts better"

Vs

"This application now collects telemetry. You cannot turn it off. You want privacy? Too bad."

The difference is asking your users to share data and demanding they give up their privacy on your whim.

> Give people the “more privacy” button and most are going to press it.

You should have a good long think about what this means and why removing privacy options is making your users upset.

When I implement telemetry in a FOSS project, I go well out of my way to do it in the most respectful way I can. This usually takes the form of a detailed list of what is and is not being collected, along with why I need it. During first run, there is either a very prominent notification or a full on blocking step where the user must choose whether to enable telemetry. This includes text explaining why I want telemetry and a link to the documents.

My philosophy is that users are not idiots and they are not children that need coddling. I make my request, give them the information, and let them make their choice. That's it, end of transaction. The user made a choice and the matter is totally out of my control.

Anything less is not respecting your users.